Artist Levin A. Diatschenko will endure the confines of a transparent, geodesic dome housed within Darwin’s Northern Centre of Contemporary Art, surviving on one vegetarian meal a day and the ritual of contemplation and prayer.
Each prayer or mantra is tally-marked on a piece of paper which the artist will paste to the walls of the dome once full facing outwards for the audience to view and repeated until the dome is completely covered, enclosing the artist inside a cocoon of prayers.
Through this process, Diatschenko hopes to bring two opposing forces together – the desire for spiritual solitude and surrender, and the need to participate in communal activity – fused by repetition, discipline, and the metaphysics of prayer.
Levin A Diatschenko, Cocoon of Prayers, manipulated photograph by Lukas Bendel
‘In our lives, we surround ourselves in many emotions and thoughts, anxieties and worries, daydreams and so on, so that we are in a cocoon of self-absorption. But we are not aware of the cocoon,’ writes Diatschenko.
‘Religious aesthetics have a practice of becoming aware of their emotional environment and thought-activity. They not only become aware, but they begin transforming their ‘cocoon’ to something beautiful, using positive thoughts and loving emotions. They do this by repeating prayers all day… Each prayer is a brick.’
The performance will be documented by filmmaker Lukas Bendel and live-streamed in 360-degrees to an extended audience.
An artist talk-debrief at the end of the performance will take place on Saturday 23 February at 12pm.
Northern Centre for Contemporary Art
25 January to 23 February, 2019
Northern Territory
